Harold Prince Quotes
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I don't like abrasion while I'm working. I don't thrive on chaos. I enjoy what I'm doing, and it seems to work better when I am enjoying it.
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Ethel Merman would stay with a show for years and tour with it. So would Mary Martin, the great stars. They recognized the value of that success and nurtured it. Now, you come from Hollywood, you play 12 weeks and go away. I don't think that's the best policy.
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Nobody has yet proven that taking a chance and doing something unique that an audience isn't used to is a bad idea. What the theater lacks is that kind of courage.
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I don't think there's a defined contemporary American musical, do you?
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It's nice to stay up nights worrying about the material, and not about the investors who gave you $10 million to do your musical.
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There was never any question that I would go to college, that I would travel, that I would go to the theater early and often.
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Lyrics can't do what they do - or should do - when you're creating a musical with rock lyrics. There's plenty of room for rock musicals, just not all rock musicals.
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I'm crazy about Dublin. If you went back 3,000 years in my ancestry you wouldn't find a drop of Irish blood in the veins, but I love the place.
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I wouldn't be here if it weren't for 'Show Boat.' The kind of theater I chose to be involved in is completely a direct reflection of what 'Show Boat' made possible.
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When I was a 25-year-old kid, I raised $260,000 for my first show, 'The Pajama Game,' in such a homemade, pathetic, endearing way - a buck here, a buck there.
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Producers want to put their music behind revivals but I don't think that's a good trend for the theater at all.
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Audiences are very willing to be taken somewhere, and to ask an audience beforehand what it wants is probably, I think, a mistake. Much better you should tell them what you want and hope they agree with it.
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It's fine when you careen off disasters and terrifyingly bad reviews and rejection and all that stuff when you're young; your resilience is just terrific.
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I'm just really trying to say what I really mean, which is: 'Your eye's on the prize, your eye's on the future. It's nice to know that a lot of wonderful things have happened to your life and that so much of it has been successful. That's great, but the work is really what makes it fun - and that has to be the future.'
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I always liked the visuals to be choice and at the same time minimalist. And, I love black boxes. After all, that's what theatre is, it's an empty space, and it's both limited and unlimited because the space is the space, but what you can do with people's imaginations is really endless.
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Despite the successes, you remember the failures - rather lovingly.
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I feel so much more comfortable when I'm working on material which makes other people scratch their heads and ask, 'You're going to make a musical out of that?'
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I think when you start analyzing trends and start making shows for a particular audience, you are making a fatal move. I think that's why people are doing too many revivals, that's why there's a plethora of rock musicals. There's room for everything, but not room for too much of anything.
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Everything can't be a postage-stamp-sized project. Everything can't be a chamber piece. Musicals aren't even meant to be that, or identified with it... It's none of it simple.
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The idea that I have to be on the same side of the fence as Dan Quayle is cruelly depressing to me, but the truth is, I believe in family values.
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When I started producing, it was George Abbott directing and he would let me do the scenery. He just wanted to know where the doors were - the entrances, the exits; the tables, the props - and then I would hire the designer. I took charge of the visuals - scenery and costumes and so on. And, the shows looked wonderful.
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We've got to find a way to protect the process of making musical theater.
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There are wonderful composers and librettists out there. It's the lack of creative producers that is troubling.
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I really like reaching out and seeing the audience - they're potential audiences! And on occasion I can make them excited about going to the theater again, if they've ceased or gone less.